


Meme Ficlet: Bared

by greywash



Series: Meme Ficlets (Spring 2012... and onward) [10]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-05
Updated: 2012-05-05
Packaged: 2017-11-04 20:30:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/397926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greywash/pseuds/greywash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>Meme ficlet, archived off Tumblr; unbeta'ed and un-Britpicked.</em>
</p>
<p><strong>mrspeelisreadingthings requested</strong>: Number 7 is in a strip club. Why are they there, are they enjoying themselves, and is it a high class or low class club?</p>
<p>
  <strong>7. Mycroft</strong>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Meme Ficlet: Bared

Sherlock calls Mycroft a prude on a fairly regular basis. He isn't. Quite the opposite, really; at present, he has a lover in Paris, which he will confess is really mostly just tradition, and another in New York, who is entirely a self-indulgence. Agathe is dark-haired and blue-eyed and chronically bored but too polite to tell him, and if she has a life outside their interactions she is far too careful to ever reveal it. Mariana, for her part, sings professionally and routinely throws things at him and then lets him peel off her garments a half-inch at a time with her body tucked between his body and her nineteenth-story window, with her hair frizzed out all around her flushed and triumphant face and her fingers betrayingly soft in his hair. Bodies are bodies. Some of them—Gwen, Laura, Anthea, Priya, Agathe, Mariana—are beautiful.

Mycroft knows better than to think this is about any of that at all.

Tonight Sherlock is tucked into a chair in a shadowed corner, reduced to the angular line of his forearm, a curl of hair flopped limply over a pale curve of ear, illuminated in the stuttering flashes of colored light, in time with the throbbing and insistent bass. Mycroft can see him past a long, honey-golden pair of legs in motion. The woman is extraordinary: very tall, and very beautiful, and really very nearly nude, but Sherlock doesn't even look up. Mycroft meets her small smile with a microscopic nod, then twists between the sticky tables and uses his umbrella to nudge the chair beside Sherlock away from the table.

"Bit of a cliche," Mycroft says, sitting down. Sherlock doesn't look up. Mycroft leans over and taps Sherlock's glass. "Drowning your sorrows?"

"No," Sherlock says, which is unnecessary, because Mycroft has known him for twenty-eight years. Mycroft nods and leans back in his chair. It creaks rather alarmingly.

"Just let me know when you're ready to go," Mycroft says. "The car will wait."

Sherlock says nothing. Inevitably, in these moods, he frequents parties in abandoned buildings with "friends" ten years his junior, or tucks himself into bottom-tier nightclubs where the stagelights are sickly-saturated and flicker tiredly. Six years ago, when Mycroft had dragged him out Sherlock's face would be flushed splotchy red, hair sticky with sweat, his mouth loose and foreign and smiling, but it's been a long time since Mycroft saw him smile, even like that. Whatever ecstatic bacchanalias Sherlock has flung himself into bodily in the past, they are very much, in fact, in the past; behind him utterly, which Sherlock, at least, can't seem to recognize. Tonight his wrists are still and pale, and his mouth is curved, down, and it's been a long, long time, since he has known how to hide from Mycroft.

Sherlock exhales. He says, "I thought you hated places like this."

Mycroft watches the woman on the stage, the undulating curve of one satiny hip. Her hair is perfect. It blocks her face. He thinks about Mariana's temper and her fleshy hips and too-strong jaw, about Agathe's perfectly cultivated boredom and the way she lights her cigarettes. The woman on the stage turns, a blur of shadowed hair and anonymous skin, and Mycroft says, "I do."


End file.
